Ajattelun hajautunut aineellisuus

Markku Koivusalo

The Dispersed Immateriality of Thought

Today many social scientific studies claim to be “foucaultian”. Foucault’s one and only properly methodological book, The Archaeology of Knowledge, which after almost 40 years from its original publication has now been translated to Finnish, has become a kind of classic of discourse studies. However, it is clear that Foucault’s archeology of discourses is something very different from what is usually done under discourse analysis. What kind of discourse analysis is then the subject mater of Archaeology of Knowledge? What were the fields of discourse and the archives of knowledge (savoir) that formed its own conditions of discourse? What was the discursive effect that the book tried to create? The article explores the archaeology of The Archaeology of Knowledge. It maps the fields of discourse and the strategies by which the book tried to separate itself from other historical and philosophical studies. It relates its theories to the discursive struggles of the 60’s and places it in the context of Foucault’s general philosophical project.